How To Make Red Curry Salmon

A delicious combination of Thai red curry and coconut flavors with wild Pacific Northwest Salmon. We were surprised by how well these flavors went together but we’ve made this a few times now and it is fantastic. Hopefully you can find wild salmon for this recipe as it’s so much better than farmed salmon. This recipe requires you to already have the red curry paste on hand.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Red Curry Salmon:

The Salmon Pieces

We’ll start with our salmon pieces. Generally you will find salmon steaks, or slices off a salmon filet. We used to see nice fat pieces of salmon but recently we have been finding much skinnier fish. Whatever salmon you can find is going to work with this recipe, you will just have to watch the final cook time so you don’t overcook it. We like this recipe with skin on salmon but you can make it with the skin off as well. Start with the skin side down and sprinkle salt and pepper over your fish.

Cook Skin Side Up For 1 Minute

Then we will heat some olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. We’ll place the salmon pieces in the oil skin side up and cook for one minute.

We really are only trying to get a little flavor on our salmon and in our pan at this point rather than trying to cook it through. So after just one minute we will remove the salmon to a plate. You can see how much it has cooked by looking at the side of the pieces.

Cook Shallot and Ginger

Next we will add a bit more oil to our pan and add the chopped shallot and ginger. We want to cook this for about 3 minutes, until the shallot gets softened somewhat.

Add Coconut Sugar and Garlic To the Pan

Once the shallot is cooked a little we will add coconut sugar and the chopped garlic. If you don’t have coconut sugar you can substitute brown cane sugar. We find coconut sugar in the bulk section at our local co-op store. You can also find coconut sugar at this link on Amazon.

Add Curry Paste, Chile Paste and Chiles

We’ll let the garlic cook for about a minute and then add the red curry paste, chile paste and fresh chopped chiles. You can decide how spicy to make this. One serrano was spicy enough for us.

Add Coconut Milk

We’ll get that all stirred in thoroughly and let it cook together for about a minute before we add our coconut milk. You can use coconut cream here but the sauce gets thick enough with the milk and it does save a few calories. We also want to add the fish sauce now and get everything all stirred together.

Add Lime

We will let this cook for 5 minutes and then we’ll add our lime juice and lime slices. Once we get that stirred in we will let it cook for 15 more minutes or so until the sauce has thickened.

Add Salmon

Then it is time to cook our salmon the rest of the way. We will put the salmon in the pan skin side down and let it cook for 5 minutes. You can see on the side of the fish pieces how the cooking is progressing. You don’t want to overcook the fish!

Be Careful Not To Overcook the Salmon!

With salmon a little underdone is much better than a little overdone so just watch it carefully and take it off the heat as soon as it looks done.

Plate with rice and serve immediately.

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Here are some other recipes that use red curry paste:

• Red Curry Chicken
• Red Curry Pork Tenderloin
• Thai Coconut Curry Crab
• Chicken Satay With Peanut Sauce

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